Anti-Racism Reading List August 2025

"But the verse they won’t sing?

No refuge could save the hireling and slave,

From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.

That was the third stanza. The one where Francis Scott Key made it plain: Freedom wasn’t for us. Death was. This anthem was never a promise, it was a threat."

"Even where a dedicated Black-owned space isn't available, many people are leveraging publicly owned spaces, such as parks and libraries, to fill the void. Shamichael Hallman, the director of civic health and economic opportunity at the Urban Libraries Council, described libraries as being a place uniquely suited to meet our need and “hunger for connection.”"

"The Global Inequality Project does not name whiteness as a logic of global extraction. It does not confront how white epistemic authority continues to shape what is knowable, fundable, and publishable. In doing so, it doesn’t merely risk reproducing the same hierarchies—it actively sustains them, reaffirming who gets to be seen as rigorous, credible, and “clear.”"

““Same siding” relies on an illusion of ethical purity. It treats empathy as allegiance, and open discussion as betrayal.

I am occasionally told that I’m too balanced and that I give the “other side” too much grace. There may be some truth in that - whilst my stance is unequivocal, I refuse to match the vitriol that I often see and experience directly."

"For too long, the myriad ways in which our modern world was shaped by grossly unequal colonial-era relations were glossed over as historians focused on other topics – often those which showed Britain in a favourable light. But the truth is that traces of the exploitative dynamics of previous centuries are all around us: in our global financial system; in the landscapes and built environments of former imperial powers and the countries they colonised; in museum collections; and in the histories of organisations such as the Guardian, which examined its own links to slavery in the Cotton Capital project."

"We never want to give white people — who already view us as immune to pain, as consistently and forever unequal — a reason to think we are irrationally upset, which is how anger voiced from a Black woman is usually construed. But the catch is that never expressing your emotions makes people believe you don’t have them or your feelings don’t matter. And it allows deeply rooted biases about race and gender to persist."

"The Imazighen are the indigenous people of North Africa, once labelled “Berber”, a term many reject as derogatory. Their identity is rooted in descent from the region’s pre-Arab inhabitants and the Tamazight language. Estimated to number 30–40-million across the Maghreb, most live in present-day Morocco and Algeria."

"In other words, an anti-trans Substacker used a eugenicist Substacker to launder information from a neo-Nazi, and smuggled it into the most powerful paper in the country – with the help of some of that paper’s editors – in an attempt to smear a mayoral candidate of color whose leftist politics they all oppose. As Substack’s founders have demonstrated in the past, this is an example of their platform functioning by design."

"Dominant science (sometimes referred to as Western science) is rooted in colonization, racism and white supremacy: it has been an active participant in the assimilation, marginalization and genocide of Indigenous people. Black and Indigenous people have been exploited repeatedly by dominant science for monetary and educational gain, and many institutions were funded by money acquired after stealing Indigenous lands."

"They were spoon-fed the lie that being called out for being racist (accountability) is the same as being oppressed. That discomfort is violence. That white people losing dominance is somehow injustice. They were taught that racism is someone being “mean” to them. Not displacement. Not incarceration. Not sterilization. Not state surveillance. Not being bombed in your own homeland. Not being deported while picking the food others eat. Not having your water poisoned and your neighborhoods flooded and your children criminalized."